ANNE LAMOTT QUOTES V

American author (1954- )

The usual things helped: some distance, prayer, chocolate.

ANNE LAMOTT

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith


It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.

ANNE LAMOTT

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Tags: prayer


I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake.

ANNE LAMOTT

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Tags: success


Our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.

ANNE LAMOTT

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

Tags: charm


This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.

ANNE LAMOTT

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Tags: parenthood


The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

Tags: artists


I ate a few chocolates and felt more animated. Then I crashed and was just as sad as I'd been before, but fatter and tired.

ANNE LAMOTT

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

Tags: chocolate


For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very--it's like being a shoemaker. You know, shoemakers stick to your last and you stay there working over your last, and it's pretty drudgy in a lot of ways.

ANNE LAMOTT

interview, Big Think, Apr. 6, 2010


A man dies and goes to heaven. He is being shown around by an angel. Everything is just so sweet and gentle, the total golden tender presence of God everywhere, a pond over there, a beautiful field there, and some hills for people who like to hike, and this expansiveness in every direction of sky and light and physical beauty. And there is this section separated from the rest; it has beautiful high walls. The man who's just come to heaven says, "What's over there?" The angel says, "That's for the fundamentalists. They don't consider it heaven if anyone else got in."

ANNE LAMOTT

"Jesusy Anne Lamott", Christianity Today, Jan. 1, 2003

Tags: Heaven


You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

Tags: writing


It's almost like learning to meditate to learn to hear what your kid is actually saying.

ANNE LAMOTT

interview, beliefnet


This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

Tags: writing


I don't know much, but I understand how entirely doomed I am without God.

ANNE LAMOTT

interview, BookBrowse

Tags: God


It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.

ANNE LAMOTT

Traveling Mercies


Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

Tags: hope